While unemployment certainly deserves a conversation of its own, I think the more overlooked aspects of education and democracy will erode our society deeper into a hole by themselves.

I'm rather fearful for the future of education in this current climate. The tools are already powerful enough to wreak havoc and they haven't stopped growing yet! I don't think we'll properly know the effect for some years now, not until the kids that are currently in 5th, 6th, or 7th start going into the workforce. While the individual optimist in me would like to see AI as this great equalizer, personal tutor for everyone, equal opportunity deliverance, I think we've fumbled it for all but a select few. Certainly there will be cases of great success, students who leverage AI to it's fullest extent. But I urge one to think of the other side of the pie. How will that student respond to this? And how many students are really in this section?

AI in its current state presents a pact with the devil for all but the most disciplined and passionate of us. It makes it far to easy to resign all use of your critical mental faculties, and to stagnate in your various abilities to navigate our complex modern world. Skills such as critical reading, synthesizing, and writing are just a few of the most notable examples. Unrestrained use of tools that help us so immensely in these categories can bring nothing but slow demise for us in the end.

This thought pattern pairs nicely with the discussion of AIs effects on democracy. Hopefully the step taken from assuming the aforementioned society, with its rampant inabilities to reason critically about its surroundings, to saying that this is categorically bad for democracy, isn't too large. Democracy, an imperfect form of government that is the best we have at this moment, only works well with an educated populace. An uneducated democracy governs on borrowed time. One can already see the paint start to peel (there is a larger effect that the Internet has on democracy that I'll leave out of this for now, but is worth thinking about as it's the one responsible for the current decline in our political reality).

The unfortunate conclusion that I reach when I think of all of this, is that it comes down to the ability of government and corporations to properly restrain this technology and foster its growth in a manner that is beneficial for society. And that restraint is hard to see coming with our current set up. This is to avoid being overly dramatic and saying that it's impossible.

If you look at the history of the United States, and truly observe the death grip that its baby, capitalism, has on its governance, if you look at this, you find it hard to believe that this time will be any different from times past. There is far too much money and national security concern at stake here to do anything but put the pedal to the floor and rapidly build an empire in this wild west of AI. The unfortunate conclusion is that perhaps this could have been a wonderful tool for humanity, and allowed us to realize our collective dreams, but due to the reasons stated above I believe this is unachievable with our current set up of governance and understanding of ethics, globally.